No Dawn, But Darkness
by Daughter of Thranduil
Summary: A small follow up to my stories 'A New Dawn' and 'One Good Turn Deserves Another' where Enjolras bestows kindness on an unlikely target. Henriette visits the barricade when the fighting is done.


**It's been a very long time since I wrote anything for the Les Miserables fandom! But I was looking back through my oldest stories on the site last night (how I loved writing emotionally-stunted Enjolras when I was a teenager!) and this short piece appeared. I may have another angsty multi-chaptered fic in me as I'm going to reread the book over the summer; hopefully le muse will co-operate.**

 **For this to make sense, I would advise first reading my stories 'A New Dawn' and 'One Good Turn Deserves Another', where Enjolras shows a bit of kindness to an unlikely target and it afterwards finds it returned.**

* * *

When they said there'd been an insurrection, that students had risen up and defied the National Guard and been slaughtered, I thought my heart might stop. I knew _he_ would have been part of it; in fact, I was sure he'd have been at the very centre of it; eloquent and passionately declaring that the republic had come, eyes ablaze with the fervency of his ideals.

I'd never forgotten him. I must have been the only whore in Paris to be bought for the night by a handsome man and receive a lecture on social injustice instead of pawing, drunken hands. Most of the other girls thought I'd made him up; that I'd dreamed up my _Saint Michel_ as a fantasy to comfort me in the grim realities of a poor, illiterate girl's existence. No one thought such a creature could exist, outside of a dream. But he _was_ real. I'd spoken to him on two separate nights; each one burned into my memory forever.

Had he survived?

They said the fighting was all over, and I forced myself to go down to what was left of the student barricade. I am not sure if it was the need to know for certain if he'd died, or the morbid desperation to know _how_ which drove me but I knew in my heart I would find nothing there to comfort me.

It was carnage.

I'd been tumbled by soldiers before, some of whom had been at Waterloo or Vittoria. When they got drunk, they spoke of unimaginable horror and slaughter; of the fields of Europe bathed in blood as a Coriscan and Irishman battled to be the last general standing. I felt like I was on such a battlefield when I saw the Rue de St. Denis.

The cobbles ran with blood; the air acrid with the stale stench of gunpowder, gore and vomit. If terror had a taste or smell, this was it. Men of all ages lay strewn on the ground like dolls, dead. Some had been shot, others stabbed, some bludgeoned. Some were well dressed, clearly students, while others were roughly clad working men. Their eyes gaped at nothing and their mouths hung open in silent, eternal screams. The sobs of women weeping for sons, brothers and lovers sounded oddly distant to me and I ached for them.

The vultures were already at work as well; robbing the bodies of anything of value, down to the last sou. I wanted to scream at them. _Can't you see these were_ good _men? That they fought for the likes of us to be better? Can't you see they didn't need to die for us, but did it anyway? They were men like_ him. _Leave them alone, you bastards!_ But my voice had deserted me.

Where was he? I walked amongst the fallen, holding my dress up to keep the hem from being caked in blood. God, I wanted to be sick. This hadn't been a battle, it had been a massacre! Such young men, with all still to live for, and their lives had been stolen in one single day. I saw a boy, the merest child, lying peppered with bullets and had to pause while the world swam around me.

I found his friend soon after; the curly haired medical student who'd came to fetch him from the brothel the morning after he'd been robbed. I'd only exchanged a few words with him, but he'd seemed gentle and kindly and had spoken to me politely even after he knew what I was. He'd never speak again now – he'd been bayonetted through the stomach and lay bathed in his own blood. I reached down and closed his eyes. They had been such kind eyes.

I'd observed them to be devoted friends...if the doctor was here, then _Saint Michel_ was sure to be nearby. I searched and searched to no avail until I stepped inside the nearest café, and there he was.

Slumped against the wall, next to a dark haired man who I vaguely recognised as a frequent drunkard from the cafes, my golden-haired benefactor stared lifelessly across the room. His fine white shirt was stained with blooming red patches, where the bullets had torn through him, robbing him of life.

I choked on a sob and sank to my knees beside him, blinded by tears. It felt ridiculous in a way, to weep. I hadn't really known him. He'd been an eloquent young man who'd given me shelter and paid me to sleep in his bed without him in it. He'd been a rich boy, well-educated and as far above me as the stars are above the gutter.

But still, it felt like he was _mine_.

Men will say anything to a whore, when they get going. I've had professions of love, flowery compliments, lustful declarations of what they'd like to do to me…but very few real displays of kindness. This man, this extraordinary man, had been kind to me.

And now he was gone.

I leaned forward and kissed his cold lips. It would have been a liberty I could never have taken when he was alive; he would have turned away.

"Goodbye, _Saint Michel_ ," I said tearfully, reaching out to close his eyes and smooth his hair. "Heaven deserves you all more than we do."

I looked one last time at his serene, lifeless face and then left the café. Bitterness rose in my throat like bile as the bloodsoaked carnage outside assaulted my senses all over again. So much death, and it had all been for nothing. There would be no new dawn, no better France, no justice for the meek or the poor or the lowly. No Monsieur Enjolras to lead the way, a shining beacon of hope. All that had happened was that good men...and the best man I'd ever met...had died and now the world would go on as it always did. There was no such thing as justice.

Sick with grief, I walked back to the brothel.


End file.
